Monday, December 21, 2015

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.''Have they no refuge or resource?' cried Scrooge.'Are there no prisons?' said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. 'Are there no workhouses?'"

- A Christmas Carol, Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits

This Christmas, as always, my fervent wish is that we use our wealth and our might to lift people out of poverty, to share the blessings that God has given us with the billions in the world who, through no fault of their own, have been left behind. But my most fervent wish is that we take back control of our media from the hands of multinational corporations, and bring real journalism back to America. Otherwise, we will remain ignorant of the crushing poverty and pain that others suffer, and we'll continue to live IN THE DARK.

Tuesday, September 01, 2015

This is a brief excerpt of a chapter that I have written for a forthcoming book, "Jacques Ellul on Violence, Terrorism, and War."

“We need a revolution,”
Ellul concludes, “in a world in which it has become impossible,”[1] a
highly technologically developed world of the mass-manufactured, mass-marketed,
and mass-distributed reality. “We need a rediscovery of the meaning of human
activity, of the relation between means and ends, of their true place in a
world which is given up to the love of power”[2]
over material reality.

The revolutionary
spirit – the will to fight the violence of technique – demands that we
acknowledge the fact that violence is a natural and normal part of society,
that it dwells in what Ellul calls “the realm of necessity” “imposed on
governors and governed, on rich and poor. If this realism scandalizes
Christians, it is because they make the great mistake of thinking what is natural is good and what is necessary
is legitimate.”[3]

In considering violence
to be part of the human condition dwelling in the realm of necessity, and
acknowledging that fact, it might become possible to cease our attempts to
avoid it. For in our avoidance, it seems, we often do nothing more than replace
one form of violence with another, move the realm of necessity from the world of
nature to the world of technique. With great and constant and unavoidably
violent force, our technological culture promises to protect us from violence
and consistently delivers on that promise. All we have to do in return is to
allow ourselves to be constrained, limited, shaped, and guided by values that
aren’t our own; to give up everything that makes us most authentically human – our
curiosity and creativity, our empathy and reason, our organic connections to
nature and to each other. True human freedom is found in that brief,
too-frequently comfortable interval between the stimulus and the response,
between the offer and the acceptance, and in the realization that freedom is that
perpetual struggle against necessity implicit in our conscious free will.

Friday, June 05, 2015

(This is a brief excerpt of a paper I'll be delivering in July in France at a colloquium on "Resistance in the work of Jacques Ellul")

We are now being told that a transformation is under way in American
Higher Education. This transformation is commonly explained by two major
factors: 1] cuts in state support for higher education, and 2] increased
competition from non-traditional educational institutions (e.g., on-line “universities”
such as the University of Phoenix, Argosy University, and Capella University).
Universities have become dependent on tuition due to decreased external
(usually state) funding; in fact, nearly half (47%) of the national average
institutional cost of educating a student is paid for by tuition,[1]
up from 23.8% in 1988.[2]
Today, roughly 71% of all US graduates finish their schooling in debt[3];
their average indebtedness rose to $29,400.00 in 2012 – an increase of 25% over
an average indebtedness of $23,450 in 2008.[4]
Furthermore, the addition of new technologized education platforms, on-line
universities, MOOCs (“massive open on-line courses”) and the like have only
exacerbated the situation by drawing students away from traditional colleges
and universities, making those institutions even more tuition dependent. In
alarming rhetoric, we are told by administrators that academia is in an
existential crisis which demands executive action without regard to the wishes,
needs, or aims of faculty:

Unprecedented problems
confront our campuses. Institutions ignore a changing environment at their peril.
Like dinosaurs, they risk becoming exhibits in a kind of cultural Jurassic
Park: places of great interest and curiosity, increasingly irrelevant in a
world that has passed them by.[5]

Many governing
boards, faculty members, and chief executives believe that internal governance
arrangements have become so cumbersome that timely decisions are difficult to
make, and small factions often are able to impede the decision-making process.[6]

In response to
these systemic economic problems, university administrators across the country
have introduced with surprising consistency – to the dismay of faculty and of
many staff but with the encouragement of governing boards – sets of policies
that, while no two universities may have exactly the same response, still
contain a number of curiously similar items: the elimination of tenure, diminution
of faculty’s role in shared governance, the remediation of “curricular
stagnation,” an increase in (faculty) productivity, the control of costs, etc.

Notwithstanding the sacrifices that
have been borne – almost exclusively – by faculty and staff around the US in
the last several years (faculty salaries have essentially flat-lined in the
last few years and in many cases have not kept up with inflation[7];
the proportion of full-time, tenure-track faculty has been steadily decreasing[8]
while at the same time 25% of all US adjunct faculty are forced to supplement
their income with public assistance such as Medicaid and food stamps[9]),
I choose not to question immediately the need for greater institution-wide productivity
or the control of costs. Indeed, as I shall soon argue, these are critical
issues for the survival of higher education in the US; just not in the same
way, or for the same reasons, as argued by administrators and governing boards.
However, I believe that three of these issues – tenure, shared governance, and
the so-called “curricular stagnation” – are a red herring that places an even
greater burden on both full-time and adjunct faculty, threatens academic
freedom, denies administrative accountability, commoditizes curriculum, and
will, if left unchallenged, hurt students.

I believe that US higher education
is on the verge of adopting a “free-market” model of higher education, a
top-down structure of bosses and workers, a commoditization of information that
mirrors the technological society, that focuses not on the needs of students as
citizens and people, but on the culturally-derived desires of students as
consumers and future functionaries of the free market.

[5] Kellogg
Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities. Taking charge
of change: Renewing the promise of state and land-grant universities. (Washington,
DC: National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, 1996),
p. 1.

[7]
Curtis, John, and Thornton, Sarenna. Losing
Focus: The Annual Report on the State of the Profession, 2013-14. Academe (Washington,
DC: American Association of University Professors, March-April 2014), p. 5.

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.[16]

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.

[1]
The title itself takes liberties with the idea of “the tomb of the unknown
soldier,” within which is interred the arbitrarily chosen remains of an
unidentified World War One casualty. This single unknown soldier symbolizes all
who have fought and died anonymously for the United States. So this poem
appears to be satirizing the idea of serving and giving one’s life to one’s
country by applying this honor to the mere citizen, a not-wholly-outrageous
idea, in fact, until you read the details of the poem.

[2]
The unknown citizen didn’t die on any battlefield and the poet – who we will
soon find sounds like little more than a dispassionate bureaucrat – seems to
know a lot of details of his life; so it’s reasonable to question why he
remains anonymous at the end of his life. This seems an oblique foreshadowing –
whether conscious or not, deliberate or not – of themes developed by Jacques
Ellul in The Presence of the Kingdom (1949), The Technological Society (1964),
and Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965): the relationship of
the individual to the mass, the primacy of the mass, the loss of identity in
technological society, etc.

[3]
Praise is replaced by an official accounting; praise is replaced by the absence
of criticism.

[4]
The “modern sense of an old-fashioned word” – saint – has very little to do
with sanctity and much to do with conformity to technical standards.

[5]
There’s an odd juxtaposition here that could easily be missed: the poet/bureaucrat
is saying “except for the war” – which is a cataclysmic, life changing event
that leaves no one unaffected – he led a rather mundane life as a factory
worker. But how do we skip so blithely over this anonymous individual’s wartime
experiences? The “unknown citizen” has no voice of his own in this poem –
indeed, we suspect he had no voice of his own during the entire course of his
life – and it would be tempting to hear what he has to say about his experiences
in the war, as a worker, as a citizen, as a family member, etc. And, once
again, to note that he “never got fired” is as close as we get to praise in
this line; the absence of criticism in lieu of actual praise.

[6]
Again, faint praise: he “satisfied” his employer. Did he only do the minimum?
Or is “satisfaction” the best any unknown citizen can expect as a consequence
of a life’s labors?

[7]
The unknown citizen was a conformist in every possible way. Not only was he a
dutiful employee (who “satisfied” his employers), he was a dutiful member of
his class, the laboring class, a dues-paying union member.

[8]
Again the bureaucrat steps in to assure us that even the labor union –
potentially an agent of radical change in industrial society – was conformist
and “acceptable” to society.

[9]
Ellul, in “Propaganda,” talks about “human techniques,” that is to say the
various fields of psychological research and practice concerned the full
integration of the human person into an environment that is fundamentally
unnatural. Clearly, the unknown citizen was fully assimilated in his
meaningless existence, socializing comfortably with his “mates” and taking “a
drink” – but not to the point that his drinking behavior becomes disruptive to
his social roles.

[10]
This is a page ripped from Ellul’s “Propaganda.” Let me say right now that I am
completely aware that Auden composed this poem before either Ellul’s “Technological
Society” or “Propaganda,” and this is a testament to his critical vision. Ellul
tells us that the mass media of social control must be concerned that their
constant efforts are fruitful. Furthermore, to be effective propaganda must be
continuous and continual, affording the citizen no opportunities to find and
take recourse in points of reference outside the dominant system of propaganda.
So there is another “human technique” at work here; in our post-modern world it
is the ratings service (a la Neilsen), the socio-economic institution that
assures us that messages are hitting their intended audiences.

[11]
The technological society is far more concerned with product than with process.
It doesn’t really matter what malady the unknown citizen suffered from; what is
important is that the technological system worked to rid him of it.

[12]
The technological society no longer recognizes human ends; the means, in the
technological society, become the ends. We don’t produce to satisfy a need; we
produce only in order to produce, and use our “human techniques” (e.g., “marketing”
and “advertising”) to create artificial needs. The ability to respond to these
messages of artificial needs (i.e., “advertisements”) is a critically important
characteristic for an individual in the technological society. It proves he has
assimilated fully from individual to constituent of the mass.

[13]
I’m convinced there’s some significance to the fact that Auden referred to this
particular technology by a brand name (Frigidaire) rather than by its
technological name (refrigerator). I just haven’t figured out yet what the
significance is…

[14]
Ellul, in “Propaganda,” emphasizes the centrality of public opinion research to
the processes of propaganda. For one thing, he notes that people in a highly
technologically developed society feel entitled to be a part of the political
system. Paradoxically, however, he notes that governments cannot follow public
opinion when forming, enacting, and carrying out policy: public opinion is
inherently volatile and changing; government policy cannot follow public
opinion, so public opinion must be made to follow government policy.

[15]
Passively, without dissent, to be sure. How could it be any other way?

[16]
Planning is most certainly a central characteristic of the technological
society.

[17]
Freedom and happiness are central themes in all of Jacques Ellul’s works. The
highest form of human freedon, to Ellul, is individual thought; the ability to
think critically about the world and one’s place in it. Critical thinking – and
therefore freedom – is short-circuited by the various techniques of the technological
society, including (and, in fact, primarily) propaganda. To be most fully free
is to be able to question one’s culture and make moral judgments about it,
about its values, about its goals, about its direction, etc. Happiness, then,
is a natural consequence of freedom. One cannot truly be said to be happy if
one’s life is determined by one’s environment.

[18]
The bureaucrat brings the poem around full circle. The “unknown citizen’s” life
is planned, measured, and evaluated in real time. Judgments are made not on the
basis of achievements, but on the ability to adhere to the plan – on both the
individual basis but also on the basis of the plan’s effects on the level of
the mass. Notations are made only of deviations from the expected norm of the
mass, not on the basis of objective achievements of the individual. So the fact
that we (the bureaucratic class) are not aware of any “problems” (deviations
from the mass norm) is all the sign we need to make the final judgment: not
whether the “unknown citizen” was either free or happy (words which have no
meaning in this technological context), but whether he was in conformity with
the expectations of social planners. A perverse sort of utopia if ever there
was one.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

I just learned that an old, one-time friend of mine was
elevated to Bishop. I won’t mention where and for the purposes of this brief
essay, I’ll call him only “Jay.” And also without saying why, I’ll tell you
that I was flabbergasted when I heard this news. Not terribly surprised, I
admit, for Jay’s ambitions were always pretty apparent, but I was still flabbergasted.
After my usefulness as Jay’s friend diminished and we drifted apart, I decided
(perhaps uncharitably, perhaps not) that I didn’t think Jay was much of a
priest. He will, of course, make a perfect Bishop.

One of the reasons this has jarred me as much as it has was
because of the passing of another friend this past weekend. Kaye Ashe was a
Dominican Sister, a scholar, a theologian, and a feminist. I met her and got to
know her simply because she was close friends with another wonderful soul who
had befriended me. Joan O’Shea, another Dominican Sister and childhood friend
of Kaye’s (they met in kindergarten!), was one of several faculty and staff
from Dominican University in River Forest who traveled to Fanjeaux, France, in
May of 2002 for a summer study program on Dominican history and the Dominican
tradition. I was one of the representatives of another Dominican college from
Long Island.

My wife Mary Pat was also one of the Dominican University
travelers on this pilgrimage, and that, in fact, is where and how we met. Joan
was one of our first mutual friends and has remained our friend ever since.

I first met Kaye at Mary Pat’s and my engagement party. Kaye
and Joan talked with us until late in the evening, after other guests had gone.
I have a very clear image in my mind – vivid, immediate – of Kaye standing
alone in the backyard of Mary Pat’s house, eyes closed, swaying to whatever piece
of music was playing on the stereo, a soft smile on her face, clearly enjoying
a moment of non-verbal prayer. That’s how I think of Kaye even now: swaying,
playing, praying.

We last saw Kaye just around the New Year. We were having dinner
with Joan and other friends and Kaye stopped by (they lived in the same
apartment complex). She had been ill for the last few years but looked well
this evening. She left a copy of one of her books that she asked us to read a
passage from after we had finished eating. The book was “Today’s Woman,
Tomorrow’s Church,” and the passage was about Molly Burke, another friend who
was with us that evening, along with her husband Ed. This was Kaye: quick to
share her feelings, quick to praise the strengths of others.

There was more to Kaye, of course, and I was privileged to
learn about her. Being a divorced and remarried Catholic, one is forced into
confronting certain uncomfortable facts about yourself that, like it or not,
others are bound to make judgments about. For instance, doctrinally I am
excommunicated. That’s a fact I live with. Again, doctrinally (and that is not
a meaningless word), if and when I go to mass and choose to receive communion,
I am not only in a state of sin, I am committing a further sin by receiving communion.

One of the things I learned about Kaye – indeed, about Joan,
and Melissa, and Jeanne, and Clemente, and all the other members of my adoptive
Dominican family – was that there was no pretense of sanctity. Holiness is not
a façade you erect or a costume you don for special occasions. Holiness is a
life lived in the peace of Christ, a life of love and forgiveness. Kaye and my
Sisters acknowledged their own imperfection, lived with it, sought absolution
for it – and forgave it in others. There was never a finger pointed at me. If
Kaye or any of my Sisters judged me, it was no less merciful than the judgments
placed on them; the judgment of a loving and forgiving God.

So losing Kaye – as little as I’ve known her, our handful of
get-togethers each year for only the last twelve years, and the last three of
them filled with her illness – has been really difficult for me. There’s no
real logical reason why it should have had the effect on me that it has.
Perhaps it’s the closeness of the event: other members of my Dominican family
have passed on to God since they welcomed me into the fold, but only a handful –
for whatever reason – have been as close in a spiritual sense as I felt to
Kaye. Joan, Melissa, Jeanne, Clemente, Jean and Philip Mary. Perhaps I’m simply
coming to terms with my own mortality and the mortality of my friends and
family. But perhaps there’s more to it.

The elevation of Bishop Jay represents something painful to
me. It represents a Church that’s not truly a home to me. It represents a Church
dominated by men and ruled by bureaucracy. It represents a church of darkness,
secrecy, chicanery; of hidden skeletons and con men playing three-card monte
with peoples’ lives. It represents asylum in the Vatican for negligent – or completely
incompetent – shepherds who relocate abusive wolves to new parishes where they continue
to prey on an unsuspecting and far-too-trusting flock. It represents a Church
that respects the primacy of men for no particularly good reason and
investigates, stigmatizes, and devalues women who lead lives guided by Christ.
It represents a Church where, no matter what kind of a person you are, you can
still get to wear a fancy gown and bejeweled mitre if you have the right
contacts in Rome.

And it all makes me sad – very, very sad. Because I think we’d
all be better off if we had a Church more like Kaye.

[1]
A gyre, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a “spiral” or a “vortex.”
The oral Irish culture, of which Yeats and his companions knew so much and with
which they were so familiar, is a culture that sees time unfolding not in a
straight line, not in a linear, unidirectional way, from a past which recedes
into the distance behind us to a future which extends infinitely before us; this
linear, uni-directional view is characteristic of literate, not oral cultures.
Oral folk see time as a cycle where “everything old is new again,” and “what
goes around, comes around.” Cyclical time is the time of birth, development,
maturity, degeneration, death, and renewal, a constantly repeating and renewing
process that reflects nature and the human experience. So I believe that Yeats
here is hinting at our approach to the end of a cycle and the beginning of a
new cycle (also borne out, I think, by the title “the second coming,” which not
only indicates a renewal but also, in the Christian sense, the apocalyptic
vision of “the end of days” and the establishment of the Kingdom of God –
except, as we shall see, Yeats has something quite different in mind than the
Kingdom of God). The image of the gyre also calls to mind Edgar Allen Poe’s
destructive and deadly maelstrom (“Descent into the Maelstrom”): a gyre, like
life itself, is powerful and dangerous and deadly and we don’t come out of it
alive. But, if we keep our wits about us, the gyre is also beautiful. But as we’ll
see, Yeats is suggesting that we’re no longer (in 1919 when he wrote this)
keeping our wits about us.

[2]
The gyre – spiral, vortex, maelstrom – symbolizes chaos. We are in a situation
of chaos. Chaos is a natural function of the material world: entropy. The
natural order of the universe is disorder. It is only through reason and the
rational exertion of energy that we create and maintain order in the world.
This idea is reflected in information theory; the entropy in a communication
system (as in any system) yields “noise,” which is actually anything that interferes
with the process of transmission/reception of messages. The “widening gyre” is
an environment of entropy, chaos, noise and uncertainty. The falcon – bred, trained
and nurtured by the falconer – no longer follows his master’s commands. He can’t
hear him, can’t understand what he wants. This is a statement of existential anxiety,
of a zeitgeist of fear and uncertainty.

[3]
Again, entropy: human history is descending into the maelstrom, the ordered
universe is coming undone, partnerships unravel, extreme views abound,
cooperation becomes difficult if not impossible. No one is listening to anyone
else.

[4]
“Mere anarchy” has always struck me as a strange sort of phrase. Not being an
anarchist myself, I’ve always considered anarchy to be a pretty bad thing. But
I believe that Yeats is saying here: “Look at the mess this world is in. 37
million people just died in WWI. Nations are destitute. Revolutions (in Russia,
in Yeats’s own Ireland) are disrupting the normal cyclical flow of life. But
you think this is bad? This is mere anarchy. What awaits us in the future is
even worse.” We’ll soon look back, Yeats is saying, to a time when “mere
anarchy” was humankind’s biggest problem.

[5]
The “ceremony of innocence” is, of course, the Christian rite of baptism, the
ritual washing away of original sin, the sin of Adam, the sin common to all humankind
by virtue of its refusal to conform human will to Divine will. This “ceremony
of innocence” is now, Yeats tells us, drowned in the “blood-dimmed tide,” a
powerful image that evokes the massive destruction and wanton murder of the
still-young 20th century. There can be no more Divine forgiveness as
humanity has fouled even the cleansing waters of nature with the gore of human
hatred and ignorance (in an environment of chaos and failed communication such
as Yeats describes here, what else could prevail but hatred and ignorance?).

[6]
Hopelessness and despair are the legacy of the immediate past bestowed upon the
few who still believe humans can do better and be better; they believe in the
potential for human good, for human improvement, somewhere deep in their
hearts, but they’ve lost all hope that they’ll ever see it. I’ve always thought
Yeats was referring to himself in this part of the poem; descendant of an
Anglican cleric, Yeats all but abandoned Christianity but remained a fervent seeker
of spiritual realities. Meanwhile, the progeny of the immediate past – the product
of warfare and dissolution, denizens of a hellish world, children of the gyre –
know better than to hope fruitlessly for the improvement of the species and are
certain only of themselves, their own needs, their own desires, their own
feathered nests. As hope based on the Enlightenment concept of rational
progress gives way to disappointment, frustration, complacency, and apathy, an
irrational and entirely emotion self-interest becomes the dominant human
ideology. Perhaps Yeats is suggesting – as I believe he is – that in its “passionate
intensity” it has even become the new religion.

[7]
The first eight lines of this poem are prophetic; in the sense that a true
prophet is not the person who sees the future, but the one who sees the present more clearly than the rest
of us. Yeats is describing the nightmare world we humans inhabit in the year
1919 and pointing out the ugliness of its reality. The next fourteen lines are
also prophetic, but in a different way. They are, again, apocalyptic in that
they reveal to us what lies ahead. And, as I pointed out before, Yeats’s use of
the phrase “the Second Coming” (capitalized for emphasis) evokes the book of
Revelations in the New Testament and the second coming of Christ. But this is a
different sort of prophet in the second part of this poem than we read in the
first part. While the first eight lines are descriptive and emphatic, the next
fourteen are tenuous, fearful, and uncertain. The poet does not know what lies
ahead, but he fears what he imagines
to lie ahead.

[8]
“The Second Coming!” An emphatic statement. All of what we once called “Christendom”
knows the meaning of this phrase. It was once a phrase imbued with hope; of
salvation, of perfection, of justice, of judgment, of eternal reward. But “hardly
are those words out” of the poets mouth when he is struck with the reality he
has only finished describing, of the reality of life in the “widening gyre.”
And he cannot ignore the image of that Spiritus
Mundi – the spirit of the world, the material worldview, the worldview of a
people awash in images but bereft of vision (this is the beginning of the age
of the image, the graphic revolution, of propaganda and advertising, of the mass
marketing of mass commodities). This Spiritus
Mundi overwhelms the poet just as the dominance of images overwhelms the
peoples’ vision (I’m always reminded, when reading this poem, of the Old
Testament book of Proverbs, 29:16: “Where there is no vision, the people
perish.”).

[9]
How’s that for an image? It’s horrible. It’s frightening. It’s mythic. “A
shape with lion body and the head of a man…” It is pagan mythology, this
sphinx-like being, this nightmare amalgam of human and animal, of civilization and
uncivilized nature, of reason and passion. Yeats sees a lion – the “king of the
beasts” – crowned with the head of a human – the human intellect? Pure
physicality ruled by pure reason. But this is not the human intellect as we
once viewed it, the human intellect of Enlightenment humanism. This is a
calculating intellect, an intellect devoid of compassion, indifferent to human
suffering, “blank and pitiless.” It’s irrational. It is atavistic. It is a
(cyclical?) return to pre-religious superstition, an embrace of magic and
demons, a denial of monotheism, a rejection of the personal relationship with
God shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It runs parallel to the
(cyclical?) abandonment of hope based on (linear) rational progress. And above
all the while circle the “indignant desert birds,” the vultures turning and
turning in the widening gyre, waiting for imminent death.

[10]
This is another reference to the cyclical conception of time common to oral
(non-literate) cultures. It is also a marker in that cycle, for the poet is
telling us we are reentering a cycle of darkness, i.e., ignorance.

[11] This is the payoff of “The Second Coming.” This
sphinx-like creature is not the problem, not what the poet fears. It is,
remember, nothing more than “a vast image out of Spiritus
Mundi,” a bogeyman, a nightmare
image, the demon that lives in the closet or under our beds as children, our
imaginations playing tricks on us. “Twenty centuries of stony sleep,” two
thousand years of Christianity, of a placebo that calms us, distracts us from
our imperfect natures, and allows us to sleep peacefully – these twenty
centuries of stony sleep are disturbed by “a rocking cradle.” It is whoever
inhabits – or will soon inhabit – this rocking cradle that we should fear. Whoever
it is whose cradle is being prepared has disturbed our complacency, awakened
our fears, and driven this primitive, atavistic sphinx-monster – predatory animal
driven by compassionless, calculating intellect – into our nightmares. “What
rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
We don’t know. And that makes its imminent arrival even more frightening.

So, what does it all mean? Is it a “religious” poem? I don’t
think so, no. Yeats was not religious in that sense, despite his ancestry. He
dabbled in Theosophy, attended séances, and befriended spiritualists, but he
was not “religious” in the common sense of the term.

It is clearly a fearful and anxious poem, perhaps a cynical
poem, certainly far from a hopeful poem. Yeats seems to have lost hope in
humanity. As a younger man before World War I, Yeats had been something of an
idealist and was a central, driving force in the so-called “Gaelic Revival” in
Ireland. Yeats saw Gaelic-Irish culture as being less refined and, therefore,
more “pure” and “authentic” than English culture, and his poetry and plays
highlight the nobility and heroism of the ancient mythic figures of Cuchullain,
Finn MacCumhall, Oisin, and Mebd. Bourgeois English and Anglo-Irish culture
lacked conviction (beyond commerce and profit); ancient Irish folk culture had
a passionate intensity to it. And Yeats championed that culture and brought it
to the people with the same sort of passionate intensity. Yeats’s work – along with
the work in general of the Gaelic Revival – was also a source of passionately
intense inspiration for the Irish revolutionary movement. He later worried (in
his 1938 poem “The Man and the Echo”) “Did that play of mine (“Cathleen Ni
Houlihan”) send out certain men the English shot?”

By 1919, too, Yeats had suffered the loss of a romantic dream.
As a young man he pursued the affections of Maud Gonne, another leading Anglo-Irish
figure of the Gaelic Revival. He was rebuffed by her on many occasions
(although they remained friends and many – myself included – believe he never
surrendered his love for her) because he lacked sufficient revolutionary fervor
and finally married George Hyde Lees in 1917. There was a lot of youthful
idealism in Yeats’s life that he saw crushed by the spiritus mundi.

As banal as this sounds, I believe Yeats was (as we say
colloquially today) “in a bad place” when he wrote “The Second Coming.” He was
an aristocrat who, as a youth, turned his back on (English) aristocratic
manners and aligned himself with the common folk. Yet he hated Marxism and
could never muster a lot of sympathy for the plight of the proletariat. He was
a romantic who had his heart broken and settled, in his marriage, for second
best. He was an idealist who eventually saw all his ideals destroyed by the
ugly realities of the 20th century. And he had only just witnessed
millions of lives being destroyed in a war like no one had ever seen before.

As popular as “The Second Coming” has become since the 2003
invasion of Iraq, I don’t think Yeats was trying to write a political poem,
either. It is nothing more than the mark of good art that people found so many
parallels between Yeats’s poem and the Iraq war.

If there’s any real identifiable target of criticism in Yeats’s “The
Second Coming” I would say it is the moral bankruptcy of commercialized mass
culture and the banality of commoditized information. He makes no direct
references to either culture or media, to be sure, but even a cursory knowledge
of 20th century history would suggest Yeats would not be blind to
the effects of media on culture. The radiotelegraph brought news of the sinking
of the Titanic to the world in 1912. Broadcasts of music and speech were common
by 1919. Propaganda had driven all sides of the conflict in World War I. “Mass
production demands the education of the masses,” said Edward A. Filene, scion
of the Boston department store empire, in 1919. “The masses must learn to
behave like human beings in a mass production world.”Walter Lippmann published “Public Opinion” in
only 1922 (“When all think alike, then no one is really thinking…”) and Edward
Bernays “Propaganda” in 1927 (“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of
the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in
democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country…”).

This is my and only my opinion, but I believe that William
Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is an expression of his despair over the decline
of transcendent values in the new century, the decline of a compassionate
humanism founded on and supported by those values, and the loss of his own
idealism.

Peter K Fallon

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About Me

A PROUD MEMBER OF THE REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY-- and of the 99%. Professor of Media Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago, 23 year veteran of the television industry, 18 years with NBC News' "Today" program.